Going Around: on Hannes Brunner´s Driver´s comments

Marcelo Guimarães Lima

A trip, explains Paul Virilio (*), is composed of three parts: the departure, the path or trajectory, and the arrival. According to Virilio, today we experience the dominance of the arrival over the other elements of a journey or voyage. The acceleration of time in communication and transportation in our period results in a loss of spatial extension: “real time” has absorbed space, in the same way that an absolute present, the “now”, exemplified by the immediacy of digital communication and of virtual models or virtual worlds, is in the process of absorbing the past and the future.

The result is a time without dimensions, concomitant to a space without boundaries or configurations ensuing not from unlimited physical expansion, but from speed and the contraction of our experience of distance, and therefore of our experience of place, and ultimately of physical space as such.

Marcelo Lima, Artist and Art Historian in Dubai,
Roundabout in Media City, Dubai, 2009

In a world transformed by technology art becomes, according to Virilio, a strategy of resistance against the losses that technical transformations impinge upon human reality and experience: there is a price to be paid for every technical conquest and as much as the benefits of technical progress are in one way or another self-evident, it is the role of artists and thinkers to dwell in the negative of unintended (or unstated intended) consequences of poorly mastered or unmastered, that is, autonomous (J. Ellul) technical developments.

Corinne Schatz, Independent Curator, St.Gallen Switzerland;

Roundabout in Altenrhein, SG Switzerland, 2011

Traffic circles in Europe as in the UAE display what we may call public artworks, monuments, and also advertising and other kinds of visual as well as textual messages. Categories that are sometimes amalgamated in the uncertain species of these sculptural or three dimensional structures in highways and cities´routes, these hybrid (?) super-objects (or meta-objects), these large significant objects, that is, these public conveyers of meanings associated with place and with the functions and the experiences of the modern road transport systems and their related urban and non-urban spaces. (more)

read the complete article: CITY-SHARING Projects (Zurich)


(*) Virilio, Paul – The Politics of the Very Worst, Semiotext, New York, 1999



Driver´s Comments

project by Hannes Brunner, Switzerland, (Europe+Emirates, 2009/11)

text copyright © Marcelo Guimarães Lima, 2011


link: DRIVERS' COMMENTS by Hannes Brunner at Kunsthalle Arbon, Switzerland